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A photograph purportedly showing Anna Mae Dickinson, dubbed the luckiest woman to ever live, has been making the rounds for several years along with a story about all of the deadly incidents that she was purportedly lucky enough to survive during her lifetime: Whether Anna Mae Dickinson was supremely lucky for surviving all those historic disasters or supremely unlucky for being present at so many disasters is a matter of debate — or rather, it would be if she had ever truly existed. Anna Mae Dickinson's story can't be traced all the way back to the Titanic disaster. Rather, it can be dated back to an unsourced 2006 article posted to a web site called InstaPunk. The article was published shortly after the release of director Oliver Stone's 2006 movie World Trade Center. The article seemingly poked fun at New Yorkers who felt that it was too soon to release a film about the 9/11 terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people and used a fictional interview with a nonexistent Anna Mae Dickinson published in a nonexistent newspaper to underscore its point: The article contained details that offered clues that the story was intended as satire. For instance, it reported that all of the clocks in Dickinson's home were permanently frozen at 2:20, the time that the Titanic sank into the ocean. It also claimed that the interview with Anna Mae Dickinson was originally published in a publication called the New York Intelligencer, but we found no record of a publication by that name. A column called The Daily Intelligencer is published in New York magazine, but we found no mention of Mrs. Dickinson in their pages. Furthermore, a list of passengers aboard the Titanic does not include anyone named Anna Mae Dickinson. The final nail in this claim's coffin, however, comes from a simple reverse image search of the included photograph. The woman in this picture is not Titanic/Hindenburg/Lusitania/Pearl Harbor/September 11th terrorist attack survivor Anna Mae Dickinson. This is actually a photograph of American folk artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses (better known as Grandma Moses). The story about the Anna Mae Dickinson, or luckiest woman to ever live, was invented for a 2006 article chiding New Yorkers who felt that it was too soon to make a movie about the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. This article, which featured a fictional interview in a non-existent publication, was later boiled down into a meme which used an image of non-Titanic survivor Grandma Moses.
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